First, agriculture requires sedentism--living permanently in one place. This was itself new to human beings, and it may have seemed very constraining to the first people to experience this way of life. Living in one spot permanently means exploiting a relatively small amount of land very intensively (rather than exploiting a large amount of land extensively, as hunter-gatherers did), and over a long period of time.

To understand how radical this change was, it is necessary to consider carefully both the advantages and disadvantages of gaining one's living from one piece of ground and the effects of such a way of life on the environment.

Surprisingly, this dramatically new way of life was not very dependent on new technology. On the contrary, in the earliest phase of development, pioneer farmers used techniques and tools which had long been familiar to hunter-gatherers: the stone axe, hoe, and sickle for preparation of the fields and harvesting the grain. The primitive milling device for grinding seeds between two stones to process the grain into edible form had been in use for thousands of years by peoples who collected seeds but did not plant them.

Profound cultural rather than technological changes were necessary at first to permit adaptation to the new mode of life. But once the shift had occurred, ever more changes, both cultural and technological, became possible.

In contrast to hunting and gathering as a mode of life, agriculture means modifying the environment in order to exploit it more effectively. Agriculture alters both the animals and plants it domesticates. Ultimately, it changes the very landscape itself.

The growing of a single crop in a field by definition substitutes a biological monoculture for the complex ecological system that existed on the same ground previously. This change has several effects. The intended effect of crop-growing is that the quantity of food stuffs desired by the human farmer is greatly increased. One unintended effect is that the nutrients in the soil necessary to the growing of this particular plant are depleted. Over a relatively short period of time, growing a single crop can deplete even very rich soil. This was a problem which rendered many early agricultural sites uninhabitable after a time. It is still a very serious problem.

There are other unintended effects of crop-growing. The human farmers are consciously altering the environment and "selecting for" the plants they need for food or fiber. Unwittingly, they are also "selecting for" any organism that can live on wheat: wheat-eating "vermin," pathogens, and diseases of wheat, etc.

Thus, strangely enough, by increasing their food supply, farmers simultaneously increased threats to their food supply.

Agricultural Revolution Reading Questions

1) What is sedentism? How did sedentism improve farming?

2) What techniques and tools long used by hunter-gatherers continued to be used during the Agricultural Revolution?

3) How is agriculture defined in the reading? Do you agree or disagree with this definition? Why?

4) What happens over time when a single crop is grown?

5) What are the unintended effects of crop-growing?